The Beginning Place

by Ursula K. Le Guin

mass market paperback, 240 pages

English language

Published March 1, 2005 by Tor Teen.

ISBN:: 978-0-7653-4625-4
OCLC Number:: 58042890

(9 reviews)

Fleeing from the monotony of his life, Hugh Rogers finds his way to "the beginning place"—a gateway to Tembreabrezi, an idyllic, unchanging world of eternal twilight.

Irena Pannis was thirteen when she first found the beginning place. Now, seven years later, she has grown to know and love the gentle inhabitants of Tembreabrezi, or Mountaintown, and she sees Hugh as a trespasser.

But then a monstrous shadow threatens to destroy Mountaintown, and Hugh and Irena join forces to seek it out. Along the way, they begin to fall in love. Are they on their way to a new beginning...or a fateful end?

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16 editions

tsvallender reviewed The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin

Review of 'The Beginning Place' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I have very mixed feelings towards this book which is, more or less, a coming of age story. We follow Hugh and Irene as they escape from their multitude of worldly worries across the threshold of a strange land.

The tale has moments of beauty, and is heaped with metaphor and meaning, but seems to peter out with very little sense of closure. The climax of the story (if it in fact can be called a climax) seemed almost irrelevant to the rest of the novel, and in the end the message seemed to be we should run away from our problems.

Not a bad book by any means, but definitely a flawed one.